Birthday Morning

Last year I was wearing a kimono and wandering around the Arashiyama Bamboo Forest in Kyoto with Rob, Brendan, Jane, Seb and Helen. It was the best birthday I ever had, a dream come true.

This year I am in self-imposed isolation in my house in France - after a trip to Paris, Vancouver, and London - though thank the heavens Rob is with me. I have not left the house in ten days and after four more days I am allowed outside for one hour a day as long as I do not go one kilometre from my front door. I must also carry an "Attestation" noting what time I left my house and the purpose of my excursion.

As of today, the Coronavirus has attacked 664, 621 people of which 142,368 have recovered. Sadly, 30, 891 have died.

Is it any wonder that I am thinking of death? When I arrived home, not knowing if I had caught the virus en route - two planes, two trains, a taxi and an Uber - I kept thinking that I should treat the two weeks of isolation as if they were my last and only do things that made me feel good and ignore the cobwebs and kitchen floor. So what have I been doing? Amongst other things, vacuuming up cobwebs and scrubbing the kitchen floor.

I feel frozen, scared and curious. How is the Covid-19 going to play out?

I have also been reading a lot of trashy novels and one good book - "Turn: The Journal of an Artist" by Anne Truitt in which she explores her day to day life as a woman, artist, and mother while at the same time recognizing that she is aging and that her life is approaching an end.

I wish I had noted more passages that hit me in the gut and perhaps I'll re-read it but for now I am caught up in her relationship with her children and grandchildren.

"The most painful fact that I have to grasp is that parental protection is an impossibility. It is also counterproductive. I cannot in honesty wish to deprive my children of the particular knowledge they can garner only from making their own decisions, and their own mistakes. No matter how much I love my children, I can merely continue to keep them company in their lives. And we all occasionally feel the chill breath of our inevitable separation by way of death."

"Come now myself to the late autumn of my life, I too am hung with its history. Certain parts of my personality remain intractable. I do not see them changing by way of any effort I can make. And when I come to die, I will die with the detritus of my history: the decay of mistakes made, of promises unfulfilled. I see this fact clearly, but with a profound, contented acceptance that in a mysterious way harmoniously contains it."

I am not sure that I have reached this point of acceptance but, from time to time, I feel a loosening of my own expectations to be something other than I am.